Over the course of three days in August, 1971, Richard Nixon and his brain trust convened a secret meeting at Camp David, radically altering a system established by the Bretton Woods Agreement and responsible for the greatest expansion of middle-class prosperity the world has ever seen. Drawing on interviews with several of the participants, Yale's Jeffrey Garten argues that it opened the way for massive market instability and speculation that has plagued the world economy ever since, but at the same time it made possible the gigantic expansion of trade and investment across borders which created our modern era of progress.